Marking as complete lol.

WE DID IT! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2452720/Mystic_Strife/

It took a little longer than 30 days for this final push, but I finally got my first game launched!

I decided to just shelf the single player content. I think this is the right call. I’ll most likely just end up releasing it as an update in the future, but for now I think it’s a good idea to just stick to my original scope.

I super happy to have completed this little project. It’s definitely a small game, and it took me waaaaaay longer than it probably needed to, but I’m thrilled that I can officially don the moniker of “game developer”! \o/

Exciting Update - We got a store page! (woo) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2452720/Mystic_Strife/

In terms of development, I feel like I might be committing a cardinal sin of of gamedev… expanding scope.

So, I was hoping to just take what I already, fix all the bugs, add a little polish here and there and just launch the dang game.

But, I wanted to see if my test build would launch on my steam deck, but since my game is exclusively multiplayer at the moment, all I could do was stare at the character select screen. It was that moment that I realized that I actually really want some single player content for this game. Not just because I’m afraid launching a game that’s light on content, but because I wanted to be able to play Mystic Strife on my steam deck to some capacity. So now I’m developing a single player mode… shit…

I’m still kind of waffling on if I should launch the game with this content or just release it as an update later. My gut tells me the latter is probably the way to go.

Game Design:

There’s a game that I think is totally rad called Devil Daggers. It’s a simple FPS where you need to survive for as long as possible in a small arena as a tons of monsters spawn. The longer you survive, the more monsters spawn until the number of monsters becomes so overwhelming you simply can’t avoid them anymore. Oh and you die in one hit.

I kind of feel like this sort of game mode would translate pretty well into Mystic Strife. For one, characters die in one hit. And I already have this “kill screen” when the timer runs out that floods the stage with an overwhelming number of killable bats. This already kind of reminds me of Devil Daggers. I imagine I can just make a dedicated game mode where the “kill screen” starts immediately (Although it will need to ramp up more slowly) and you simply have to survive for as long as possible. The game will record your best time with each character on each stage. I could also potentially tie some Steam achievements to this.

One thing that I totally wasn’t considering during the bulk of development is properly crediting the authors of all the free licensed sound and music I’m using. Unfortunately I wasn’t actually keeping track of where I got all my assets from. So, after a lot of digging I eventually got together a complete list and was able to implement a nice little credits screen. I’m really surprised at just how legit my game seems just by having a simple screen with some scrolling text of names. I’m unreasonably pleased by this lol.

I’ve been needing to get a trailer together for a while now but have been putting it off due to the fact that I have 0 video editing experience. But, it had to be done! So, I dove into kdenlive video editing software and got together a simple little trailer using some playtest footage. It’s not the most fancy trailer, but I think it’ll do! This was the last asset I needed in order to submit my Steam store page for review, so I went ahead and did that. I’m eagerly anticipating the moment when I have a real store page for this!

Check out the trailer here! https://youtu.be/1Rcpl1MX22E